A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words"YOLO SWAG LOL" drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

BunkoSquad:A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words"YOLO SWAG LOL" drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

[...] Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog.

AliceBToklasLives:By the time anyone intelligent gets the message and is able to respond I'll be long gone so ain't my problem.

What if the aliens are the moon? Now you've pissed them off by suggesting they're not intelligent, and the moon awakens from its millenia of dormant slumber, preparing to wreak revenge upon those humans that have mocked, scoffed, and insulted the flavour of it's cheese.

Slaxl:AliceBToklasLives: By the time anyone intelligent gets the message and is able to respond I'll be long gone so ain't my problem.

What if the aliens are the moon? Now you've pissed them off by suggesting they're not intelligent, and the moon awakens from its millenia of dormant slumber, preparing to wreak revenge upon those humans that have mocked, scoffed, and insulted the flavour of it's cheese.

I'm not worried about our signals and I have no reason to suspect us to hear them...

All our signals fuzz out within a few light years. Radio isn't likely to be used for long range communications and if we could figure out what the galactic civilization actually uses for telecom transmission I bet we'd find a pan-galactic version of Science Channel. And HSN.

Except we can get there. Sure it would cost a few trillion dollars, take a few hundred years to get past the closest couple dozen stars, and possibly lead to a big uptick in cancers here on Earth; but the fact remains that using available materials and technologies the gulf between the stars could be crossed. It wouldn't be fun or easy, and it's very likely we wouldn't find anything. But I believe it could be done.

wildcardjack:I'm not worried about our signals and I have no reason to suspect us to hear them...

All our signals fuzz out within a few light years. Radio isn't likely to be used for long range communications and if we could figure out what the galactic civilization actually uses for telecom transmission I bet we'd find a pan-galactic version of Science Channel. And HSN.

Turns out faster than light travel is easy but signaling hard. All messages in spess are hand delivered letters.

Nothing, since any message sent will take at a minimum dozens to hundreds of years to reach a potential destination, and even if an intelligent civilization were able to receive and decode the message, chances are the vast, endless ocean of space would discourage them from even attempting to visit us.

I wrote a short story once about a race of grumpy-old-man aliens who come to earth, wipe out all the telecommunications equipment, and then leave.

They never make any attempt to speak with us or explain themselves and our innocent protests go unheeded, but after they leave our scientists intercept an indecipherable message from them which, after years of struggling, we finally cruft out a rough translation: